A telecommunications network generally includes a collection of terminals, links and nodes which connect together to enable telecommunication between users of the terminals. Examples of telecommunications networks are: computer networks, the Internet, the telephone network, and others. Messages are generated by a sending terminal, then pass through the network of links and nodes until they arrive at the destination terminal. It is the job of the intermediate nodes to handle the messages and route them down the correct link toward their final destination. The messages consist of control (or signaling) and media parts which can be sent together or separately. The control (or signaling) part instructs the nodes where and possibly how the message should be routed through the network. The media is the actual content that the user wishes to transmit (e.g. some encoded speech, or an e-mail).
A private branch exchange (PBX) is a telephone exchange that serves a particular business or office, as opposed to one that a common carrier or telephone company operates for many businesses or for the general public. PBXs make connections among the internal telephones of a private organization—usually a business—and also connect them to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) via trunk lines.
A conference call is a telephone call in which the calling party wishes to have more than one called party listen to or participate in the call. Conference calls can be designed so that the calling party calls the other participants and adds them to the call; however, participants may be able to call into the conference call themselves.
In the context of a telephone exchange, such as a PBX, in a typical scenario, a person making a call (“caller”) may first look up the name of a person being called (“callee”), such as on a database associated with the telephone exchange. However, it may be difficult to ascertain the correct pronunciation of a colleague's (callee's) name, simply from reading their name. This can be a common problem in multinational companies, when communicating with colleagues from different nations using different languages and different dialects. In some cases, it is not even possible to realize the gender of a person just from seeing their name for the first time. Therefore, it may be awkward when calling a person for the first time, not even knowing how to address them (such as “Mr.” or “Ms.”), and it may take some time for the caller to understand if they are even calling the correct person.
A person answering a phone or joining in a conference call will often announce their name to others (“attendees”) already in the conference call, but it may be difficult for someone hearing the name for the first time to recognize it.
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous people using speech synthesis to communicate.
Text-to-speech (TTS) is commonly used for normal text in telecommunication, translation or navigation tools. In other words, the pronunciation functionality is already being used by online dictionaries in daily life for most of the words. Such tools are using computer-generated simulation of human speech which can cover the normal texts. For instance, attending a conference call one might hear the title of the conference, speech synthesized, by TTS technology. However, TTS is not well adapted to synthesizing people's names, as there is a huge variety of names and there are different accents even in one language. Even if a name is read by a TTS service, it may not provide a correct pronunciation. For example; names like Michael, Frank, etc. may be written the same but pronounced differently in English and German. Generally speaking, TTS is of only very limited utility for contact names in telecommunications.